Best free SEO tools by job, with their free limits

This guide is for anyone doing SEO without a tools budget. Think of the owner of a Kanpur sweet shop who looks after the website, a Delhi dentist's front-desk manager, a Pune coaching centre, a new D2C brand, or a freelancer with a few clients. No SEO terms needed; each one is explained the first time.

By the end you'll have a free tool for every SEO job, know each one's exact free limit, and know the point at which paying for one tool starts to make sense. Almost every limit comes from the guide we wrote on that tool, linked next to it so you can go deeper; the few others are cited to the vendor's own page.

There are seven chapters, about 35 minutes in all. Chapter 1 gives two free stacks to copy, one for a small business and one for a freelancer. Chapters 2 to 6 go job by job, with our own free tools first. The jobs are setup and indexing, keywords and content planning, on-page and technical checks, links and local, then AI visibility and measuring. Chapter 7 puts every limit in one table and says when free stops being enough. Free limits and prices were read on the vendors' own pages between 16 and 18 October 2026.

Most "best free SEO tools" lists are a pile of 50 logos. This one is sorted by job. For each job we put our own free tools first, then Google's and Bing's, then the free tiers of the paid suites, with their exact limits. Almost every limit comes from the guide we wrote on that tool, and you'll find the link next to it.

Three kinds of "free"

The word means different things on different sites, so it's worth sorting them before you sign up for anything.

• Free for good. Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Business Profile, GA4, PageSpeed Insights, Google Trends and our own tools. Apart from GA4's enterprise version, Analytics 360, which small sites don't need, no paid version is being held back from you.
• Free tiers. A paid product with a small free allowance, such as Semrush's 10 reports a day^[1] or Screaming Frog's 500 URLs per crawl.^[2] Useful, and built to make you want more.
• Free trials. The full paid product for a few days, often with a card on file. Surfer's 7-day trial converts to a paid plan unless you cancel.^[3] A trial isn't a free tool, so this guide only mentions them where there's no free option at all.

What free tools can't do

Here's the rule that saves most people money. The data Google has about your own site is free, in Search Console. No paid tool knows more about it, and Google says so plainly: "Third-party tools don't have access to our internal ranking data."^[4]

What paid suites add is everything outside your site: competitors' keywords and top pages, a full index of links to any site, daily rank tracking for a fixed list of keywords in a set city, and volumes for searches you don't rank for yet. If you don't need those, you don't need to pay. Our Search Console guide goes through that split in its last chapter.

A free stack for a small Indian business

Take a sweet shop in Kanpur with a 20-page WordPress site, a counter, and a rush every Diwali. The owner, or the nephew who runs the site, has maybe two hours a month. This is what we'd set up, in this order:

That's eight jobs covered and no bill. Add our Meta Tag Analyzer when you rewrite a page, and our Website Speed Test plus PageSpeed Insights if the site feels slow on a phone. Chapters 2 to 6 show each one.

A free stack for a freelancer

Now a freelancer in Pune with four clients: a dentist, a coaching centre, a D2C brand and a sweet shop. The base is the same for each client, owned by the client. The client creates Search Console and the Business Profile and adds you. Google's own Business Profile rules say the owner should own the profile and add you as a manager wherever possible^[5] (our Business Profile guide covers this). On top, you add tools that look at sites you don't own:

• Semrush free account for a quick look at a client's competitors: 10 reports a day and one demo project.^[1]
• Ahrefs Free on every client site you can verify, for a site audit and the site's own backlinks. It's free for unlimited verified sites.^[6]
• Screaming Frog, free version, for a crawl of up to 500 URLs on your own computer.
• A free Moz account and MozBar, for Domain Authority, the link score many clients ask about. The account gives 10 link queries a month.^[7]
• AnswerThePublic and Ubersuggest free, 3 searches a day each, for question and keyword ideas.
• Our checkers, which take up to 10 URLs per run (Meta Tag Analyzer, HTTP Status Checker, Canonical and Noindex Tag Checkers), for checking a client's fixes in one go.
• A free AI assistant for regex, formulas and first drafts that you check by hand (chapter 6).

That covers audits, on-page work, local work and monthly reports for a handful of small clients. What it doesn't cover well is daily rank tracking by city and deep competitor research, which is where chapter 7 starts. Our freelancing chapter in the career guide covers the rest of the set-up.

How the rest of this guide runs

Chapters 2 to 6 go job by job. In each one, our free tools come first, then Google's and Bing's, then the free tiers of other tools, with the limit and the guide that explains it. Chapter 7 puts every limit in one table and says when it's time to pay. Start with chapter 2, because none of the other jobs matter if Google can't index your pages.

Google lists three technical requirements for a page to be eligible for Search: Googlebot isn't blocked, "the page works, meaning that Google receives an HTTP 200 (success) status code", and the page has indexable content.^[8] Every tool in this chapter checks one of those three. Guide 1, chapter 8 walks through the first set-up step by step; here we sort the tools.

Our free tools for this job

All of these work on any public URL, need no sign-up and fetch the live page (a repeat check within a few minutes reuses the last result). The URL checkers have a fair-use limit of 10 checks a minute.

Fetches a site's live robots.txt, or takes rules you paste in before you upload them, and tests up to 10 paths for one crawler. You pick the crawler from a list that includes Googlebot, Bingbot and AI bots such as GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot. Each result shows the exact Allow or Disallow line that decided it, and there's a clear warning if the crawler is blocked from your homepage.

Checks up to 10 URLs in three places a page can say "don't index me": the meta robots tag, the X-Robots-Tag header the server sends, and a robots.txt block. It also shows the final status code and directives such as nofollow and nosnippet. This is the one to run first when a page has vanished after a redesign or a plugin update.

Reads the canonical tag and Link header of up to 10 URLs, then visits the page each one points to. It flags missing, conflicting and cross-domain canonicals, chains, and canonicals that point at a broken or redirecting page.

Shows the final status code, every redirect hop, the total response time and the response headers for up to 10 URLs at a time. Use it after a site move, or to check that old URLs return a single 301 and not a chain.

Reads the live certificate for up to 10 domains: issuer, expiry and days left, whether it covers the exact domain you typed (so test the www and non-www spellings), and the TLS version. An expiring certificate shows amber when 30 days or fewer are left.

Google Search Console

Search Console is Google's free service for checking how your site appears in Google Search. It confirms Google can crawl the site, helps fix indexing problems, lets you ask for re-indexing and shows the searches that bring people in.^[9] The free limits rarely bite a small business:

• Up to 1,000 properties per account.^[10]
• 16 months of Performance data.^[11]
• Tables show up to 1,000 rows;^[12] the API and the BigQuery bulk export go further.^[13]
• Only sites you verify, and only Google.

The two reports for this job are Pages (which pages are indexed and why the others aren't) and URL Inspection (Google's verdict on one URL, with a live test). Our Search Console guide covers both screen by screen.

Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow

Bing Webmaster Tools is a free account,^[14] and if your site is already in Search Console you can import it and skip separate verification.^[15] Bing had 1.92% of search engine traffic in India in September 2026, by StatCounter's count,^[16] but it's still worth the ten minutes. Microsoft says Copilot Chat sends a short query to Bing when it searches the web.^[17]

IndexNow is a simple ping that tells participating search engines, Bing among them, that a URL was added, changed or deleted.^[18] Rank Math's free plugin includes it.^[19] Google isn't on IndexNow's list of participating search engines,^[20] so keep your sitemap in Search Console too. Our Bing Webmaster Tools guide sets it up and shows how to prove the pings arrived.

Sitemaps

If your site runs on WordPress, the free versions of Yoast, Rank Math and All in One SEO all make an XML sitemap for you; submit its address once in Search Console and Bing. On other sites, Screaming Frog's free version can generate one for up to 500 URLs.^[2] We don't have a sitemap validator yet; until we do, the Sitemaps report in Search Console tells you if Google could read the file.

Once Google can reach the pages, the next question is which words to build them around. That's chapter 3.

We don't have a keyword volume tool of our own yet, so this is the one job where Google's free tools come first. Our Word Counter & Keyword Density Checker comes in later, once the page is written (chapter 4). For the method behind the tools, read keyword basics in Guide 1 and keyword research in depth in Guide 2.

Google's free keyword tools

Search Console is where a site with a few months of traffic should start. Performance, Search results, Queries shows the searches you already appear for, with clicks and impressions; the default view is the last three months.^[22] Real searches beat any estimate. The catch: only your own site, and only searches you already show for.

Google Keyword Planner is free, but you need a Google Ads account, and to get keyword ideas you must finish the account setup by entering billing information.^[23] You don't have to run an ad. Accounts with low or no ad spend see ranges such as "100-1K" instead of exact numbers, a change Google made in 2016.^[24] Ranges are fine for choosing which page to write. Our Keyword Planner guide shows how to open it without an ad.

Google Trends is free with no paid tier, and Classic Explore works without signing in.^[25] It shows interest on a 0 to 100 scale, not search counts, and very small terms show as 0.^[26] Use it for seasons: when "kaju katli" starts to rise before Diwali, or when "NEET coaching" peaks after results. Our Google Trends guide covers reading the scale.

Autocomplete and "People also ask" in Google's own results cost nothing and show the words real people type. Search from a phone in the city your customers are in.

Free tiers of the keyword tools

Every volume in these tools is an estimate, and each tool estimates differently. Pick one, use it every time, and compare keywords with each other rather than treating any number as the truth. That's our view from the Keyword Planner guide, and it holds for all of them.

Content planning and briefs

The paid content tools have no free plans. Surfer offers a 7-day trial that needs a card and converts unless you cancel.^[3] Clearscope has a 14-day trial.^[36] Frase has a 7-day trial with no card,^[37] and its website has free checkers that need no sign-up for a first result, including a GEO Score Checker for one page.^[38] Semrush's free account allows up to 2 documents in its SEO Writing Assistant.^[39]

For a business writing a post or two a month, we'd skip all of them. Read the top results yourself, collect the questions from "People also ask", AnswerThePublic and your own customer calls, and write the brief by hand, as Guide 2, chapter 4 shows. Our guides to Surfer, Clearscope and Frase say when they're worth paying for. Next: checking the page once it's written.

On-page work is what you change on the page: title, description, headings, text, images, links and structured data. Technical work is everything that decides whether the page loads fast and correctly for Google and for people. Both have more free tools than any other job.

Our free tools for on-page work

Paste up to 10 URLs, yours or a competitor's. Each gets a Google result preview, a social share card and a checklist for the title, description, canonical, viewport, Open Graph and X card tags. It flags titles under 30 characters as short and over 60 as likely to be cut off, and descriptions under 70 or over 160 characters.

Counts words, characters and sentences, gives a density for each keyword you enter and lists your 15 most used words plus the 2- and 3-word phrases you repeat. Pasted text never leaves your browser, and there's no limit on it. It checks what you wrote; it doesn't find new keywords.

Fetches a page or takes pasted code, finds every JSON-LD block and checks the syntax, @context, @type and baseline fields for 18 common types, such as Article, Product and LocalBusiness. It's honest about its limits: JSON-LD only, no Microdata, and it doesn't run JavaScript, so schema added by a tag manager won't show in URL mode.

Turns up to 200 URLs into HTML, Markdown or BBCode links with your anchor text and rel values (nofollow, sponsored, ugc). Handy for internal links in a long post, and for the link code you send partners (chapter 5).

Cuts out product photos with an AI model that runs in your browser, up to 10 images at a time, and has size presets for Amazon and Flipkart (2000 x 2000) and Shopify. Handy for a D2C store's product pages, and the photos are never uploaded.

Free WordPress plugins

On WordPress, a free SEO plugin writes the tags our tools check. Rank Math's free version includes redirects, a 404 monitor and 5 focus keywords per post by default.^[19] In Yoast, redirects are a Premium feature at $118.80 a year per site.^[40] All in One SEO's free Lite version has no redirect manager; that starts on its paid Basic plan.^[41] If one is already installed and working, keep it. Our guides to Yoast, Rank Math and All in One SEO cover set-up, and Yoast vs Rank Math compares the two most used.

Three more free helpers for this job:

• Rich Results Test: Google's free test of which rich results a page can get, with a preview for some types.^[42] After launch, Search Console's rich result reports show valid and invalid items, but from a sample and with a 1,000-row limit on examples.^[43] See our Rich Results Test guide.
• validator.schema.org: the general Schema.org validator, for types Google has no rich result for.^[44]
• Mangools SERP Simulator: type a draft title and description and see them as a Google result, with pixel widths.^[45]

Crawling the whole site

Our audit crawls up to 25 pages and runs 50+ checks across ten scored areas: security, on-page SEO, speed, AI visibility, off-page, lead readiness, email delivery, local SEO, social and schema, and accessibility. Without an account you get the score, every check and live progress, 1 audit a day. A free sign-in (Google or email) adds every fix with the points it adds, so quick wins come first, plus the PDF, a side-by-side with a competitor and 3 audits a day.

For bigger sites, these are the free crawlers:

Our pick: our audit for a site under 25 pages, then a weekly Ahrefs Free audit once the site is verified, and Screaming Frog's free version when you need every URL listed. Screaming Frog vs Sitebulb covers the paid step.

Speed

Gives one URL a 0 to 100 score from a live request: time to first byte, page weight, request count, compression, caching, render-blocking files, image dimensions and third-party domains, with a fix list. It says plainly that it can't measure Core Web Vitals, because those need a real browser. Use it to catch a slow server or an uncompressed page in seconds, then go to Google's tools.

• PageSpeed Insights: free, no account, any public URL.^[50] It shows real-user Core Web Vitals from Chrome users where Google has enough data, plus a Lighthouse lab test. Small sites often get no real-user data, and the lab score moves between runs.
• Search Console's Core Web Vitals report: groups of similar pages that pass or fail, from the same real-user data.^[51]
• CrUX Vis: a free page that charts weekly real-user history for a URL or a site.^[52]
• WebPageTest Starter: free with an account, 150 test runs a month from 30 locations, with Lighthouse, filmstrip and video.^[53]

Our PageSpeed Insights guide explains each number, and Guide 3's Core Web Vitals chapter covers the fixes.

With the site itself in order, the next jobs happen off it: links and local listings, in chapter 5.

Links: what you can see for free

A backlink is a link from another site to yours. Free tools show you your own links well and other sites' links only a little. We don't have a backlink checker of our own yet, so the outside tools come first here.

For a local business, Search Console plus Ahrefs Free is enough to see who links to you and to spot a spammy batch you didn't build. Bing's report is the free way to peek at a competitor's links. Domain Authority (Moz) and Domain Rating (Ahrefs) are each vendor's own score, not Google's; Google says third-party tools don't have access to its internal ranking data.^[4] Our guides to Ahrefs and Moz Pro explain what the scores measure.

Once a partner agrees to link to you, send them the code. Our generator writes up to 200 links at a time in HTML, Markdown or BBCode; in HTML it adds the right rel value: sponsored for a paid placement, ugc for a forum post, nofollow where you don't vouch for the link.

Guide 2's link building chapter covers what works and what gets you penalised.

Local: free listings first

A Google Business Profile is free to create and claim.^[58] It's the listing behind the map pack, and nothing paid replaces it. Its Performance report shows searches, calls, direction requests and website clicks, for verified profiles only, and it counts Google Ads activity too.^[59] Our Business Profile guide covers set-up to suspensions.

Then the other free places your customers look, all with the same name, address and phone:

• Bing Places for Business, free, for Bing Maps.^[60]
• Justdial, which offers a free listing.^[61]
• IndiaMART, free registration with a profile, products and replies to buyer enquiries.^[62]
• Sulekha, free to list a business; the customer leads it sends are paid.^[63]

Guide 2's local SEO chapter says what each paid plan adds and how to keep the details matching.

Our free tools for local

• Free Website Audit: its Local SEO area checks for a Google Business link, LocalBusiness schema and the same phone number everywhere on the site.
• Schema Markup Validator: checks LocalBusiness markup on your contact or location page against its baseline fields.
• QR Code Generator: 11 code types, including Location (opens Google Maps with directions), WhatsApp, UPI Pay and Website, which you can point at your review page. Free, with your logo and colours, as PNG or SVG.

Paid local tools are mostly for agencies with many locations. If you want to try one, BrightLocal has a 14-day free trial with no card^[65] and Local Falcon gives 100 free credits on sign-up for map-grid scans.^[66] A single shop or clinic doesn't need either. Next, the newest job: AI answers, and how to measure all of it.

Can AI tools read your site?

Enter a site and our checker tests its live robots.txt against 120 crawlers in 8 groups, from GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot to Bingbot and Googlebot. It gives a score out of 100 for the bots that let AI assistants find and cite you, plus technical signals such as HTTPS, a sitemap and structured data. Blocking training bots is your choice and isn't scored. For any blocked AI bot it gives robots.txt lines to paste. It reads robots.txt, not your firewall, so it can't see a firewall that blocks a bot.

Our Free Website Audit goes one step further in its AI visibility area: it asks AI who it recommends near you, and checks AI crawler access and llms.txt. Neither tool can promise a citation. GEO guide, chapter 6 explains which bots to allow and why.

Free reports that measure AI visibility

The free tiers of other tools add a little more:

• Semrush free account: a domain's AI mentions, citations and visibility score.^[72]
• Mangools AI Search Watcher: a free plan with 5 prompts and 1 monitor, updated weekly.^[73]
• Frase AI Visibility Checker: your ChatGPT result free, with an email needed for Perplexity and Gemini.^[38]
• Ahrefs: a free AI Visibility Checker on its website,^[34] and Web Analytics, which shows visits from AI assistants on verified sites.^[74]

And the cheapest tracker of all is a spreadsheet: ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot the same ten buyer questions once a month and note whether you're named or linked. GEO guide, chapter 8 sets up that log and the GA4 channel.

Free AI assistants for SEO work

Gemini has a free plan, ₹0 a month with a Google Account.^[75] Perplexity's free plan gives "practically unlimited basic searches", 3 Pro Searches a day and 1 Research query a month.^[76] ChatGPT's free plan is ₹0 a month too, with limited uploads, image creation and deep research.^[77] Our AI tools guide compares the plans in rupees and covers the privacy settings to change first.

What they're good at, free: keyword ideas and grouping, regex for Search Console filters, spreadsheet formulas, outlines, first drafts of titles and schema, and translations. What they're bad at: search volumes, rankings and facts. Google says it's "critical to manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content", and that includes titles and meta descriptions.^[78] So run an AI-drafted title through our Meta Tag Analyzer and AI-written JSON-LD through our Schema Markup Validator before it goes live.

Measuring results

Rankings aren't the result; calls, orders and enquiries are. All of these are free:

• Search Console for searches, clicks and pages, 16 months back (guide).
• GA4, which Google says you can connect "free of charge",^[79] for what visitors do after the click. Event data is kept for 2 or 14 months, so set it to 14 on day one.^[80] See our GA4 guide.
• Google Tag Manager, free,^[81] to count phone and WhatsApp taps as key events (guide).
• Business Profile Performance for calls and direction requests from Maps (chapter 5).
• Microsoft Clarity, "free forever", for heatmaps and session recordings.^[82]

Guide 2's measuring chapter explains which numbers to report to a client. Chapter 7 puts every free limit in one table and says when it's worth paying.

The free limits, side by side

Every limit below comes from the vendor's own page, as read for the guide linked in the last column. Free tiers change often, so check the vendor's page on the day you rely on one.

Sources for the rows are in chapters 2 to 6. The Semrush row is from its pricing page and free account article,^[83] the Ubersuggest row from its free account page,^[29] and SE Ranking's trial from its pricing page.^[84]

Signs free has stopped being enough

• You run out of Semrush's 10 reports or Ubersuggest's 3 searches most days, because competitor research is now your daily job.
• A client wants daily positions for 200 keywords in Pune on mobile. Search Console's average position isn't a fixed rank.
• You audit sites over 500 URLs and need saved crawls, JavaScript rendering or custom extraction.
• You need a competitor's full backlink list for outreach, not their top 20.
• You brief several writers every month and the hand-written brief is eating your week.
• You report AI visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for many prompts, not ten.
• Clients want branded reports, and building them by hand takes a day a month.

None of these apply to a single shop or clinic with a 20 to 50 page site. If you're that business, the stack in chapter 1 is enough, and the money is better spent on photos, faster hosting or better pages.

What to buy first, and what it costs

Buy for the job that hurts, not for the biggest suite. The entry plans below are from our tool guides, read on each vendor's page on the date shown. Where a vendor showed US dollars, rupees are at ₹96 to US$1, the X-Rates average for 1 to 16 October 2026,^[85] before any tax.

Two more you'll see in plugin dashboards: Yoast SEO Premium is $118.80 a year per site (about ₹11,405),^[40] and Rank Math PRO is €95.88 for the first year, about ₹10,350 by our Rank Math guide's rate.^[91] For local agencies, BrightLocal's Track plan is $41 a month for one location (about ₹3,936).^[65]

Torn between the two big suites? Ahrefs vs Semrush compares them job by job, including how to use one paid and the other's free tier side by side.

Trials: read the small print first

Our view, after all 28 tool guides in this path: most small businesses in India never need to pay for an SEO tool, and most freelancers need exactly one, chosen for the job they do most. If you'd rather not juggle any of this, our SEO service runs the tools and the fixes for you, and our content marketing team writes the pages. You can get a quote in a couple of minutes. Otherwise, set up the two tools from chapter 1 this week, then take the quiz below.

Test yourself

Ten questions on the whole guide. Pick an answer, check it, and see your score at the end.

Frequently asked questions

Sources